Why do people in Egypt now believe in Allah instead of their Egyptian Gods?
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Why do the Iranians not believe in ancient Mesopotamian gods? Why do the Scandinavians not believe in Norse gods? Why do the Greeks and Italians not believe in the Olympian gods? The answer is the same. Times change, gods change. In the case of Egypt particularly they had a rather complicated and convoluted religious system that was not unified. Each region placed different importance on each god and new cults would form with new gods taking over the older ones. Ancient Egyptian religion was fractured, with each region having their own version slightly different from the others. And the pharaohs were intertwined with the faith as they were considered gods themselves, and each pharaoh belonged to a different cult and promoted their own gods or even their own version of the faith itself.
As you may understand, this system didn’t work too well, and as the Egyptian empire crumbled and lost influence and power it was taken over by Abrahamic religions, so following the ancient Egyptian religion most Egyptians converted to Christianity, and then later with the Muslim conquest the region became mostly muslim. For a very long time Egypt was a very multicultural place having people of many faiths and from many places around the world but eventually they homogenised into what we see today.
The religion in ancient Egypt was absorbed into other ancient religions. This was common throughout the ancient world. For example, Isis was the goddess of motherhood, beauty, love, and rebirth. She came to be identified with Hera and Aphrodite under the Greeks, and then later with Juno under the Romans. The word for this process is [*syncretism*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncretism?wprov=sfti1).
This didn’t just happen in Egypt. It happened in Gaul with Celtic gods, in the near east with Phoenician gods, in Spain with Iberian gods, etc. It also happened outside of the Roman Empire, but that’s not relevant to your question.
Pretty much the only group that successfully resisted this process were the Jews, who were notorious for their unwillingness to go along with that sort of thing.
In 343 BC Egypt was conquered by Artaxerses III, a Persian emperor, and the last native Egyptian pharaoh was deposed. Egypt would not be ruled by another native Egyptian until 1953. This began a slow process of syncretism with various conquerers’ religions, first with the Persians, then with the Greeks, then most importantly with the Romans. By the 300s AD, the Egyptian religion had been entirely fused with Roman state practices, and had begun to die off as a daily faith. When Christianity replaced the Roman state religions, it happened in Egypt as well.
Egypt was increasingly Christian until the Muslim conquest in the 600s. Then, it was gradually Islamicized over the next 500-600 years.
Today, Egypt is 85-95% Muslim, with a small Christian minority.
The short answer is that they were conquered in about 640AD, but that’s really oversimple. And not “like I’m five” simple but “missing out about a thousand years of history” oversimple. For one thing they’d already been conquered by Rome, and by the Assyrians, and by a whole bunch of other people.
But the big deal is that all of that, in egyptian terms, is recent, what we tend to lump together into “ancient egypt” really gets going about 3000BC. There were, depending on who you ask, at least 3 major ancient egyptian civilisations or kingdoms but even that’s skewed by the ridiculous amounts of time involved, there were large transient kingdoms and civilisations inbetween that we just sort of dismiss as “intermediate period stuff” between the big kingdoms because they’re small fry for egypt, but which if they were in, say, England would be a huge deal in their own right.
So the religious practices and pantheon changed over time, in the same way as you can hold 2 artifacts in your hands and say “these are ancient egyptian” but then realise there’s 3000 years between them and they’re effectively from different civilisations
So the gods also rose and fell even within ancient egypt, it was a really long time even for gods. Montu, frinstance, is so old that we have no idea how old he is, but he went largely out of fashion by 1300bc. Or Aten, sun god? It was the official state religion in about 1400bc then got pretty much deleted afterwards. Loads of egyptian gods were basically forgotten even in the time which we’d think of as when ancient egyptian gods were still the thing, or overwritten by other cooler gods. they had a LOT of sun gods, I mean a lot.
So when you’re thinking “why don’t they worship these old gods” remember that even in that time of those old gods some had already been forgotten for a thousand years, or had been huge and now aren’t.
The Egyptians that built the pyramids aren’t the same Egyptians that are in Egypt now. They aren’t even the same Egyptians that had Cleopatra as their Pharoah.
The Egyptians that built the pyramids and other tombs like that are were the ones who developed that religion, and the pyramids were build as early at 2700 BC.
In 332 BC, Alexander the Great conquered Egypt, and Ptolemy was put in charge. The Greeks tended to explain other culture’s gods as their own gods, but in disguise, so the Egyptian religion survived, but from here it has a lot of Greek influences.
Around 30 BC, the Romans conquered Egypt, further influencing their culture, but the Egyptian gods did survive in some capacity.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Egypt fell under the influence of Arab powers. While Europe was entering the dark ages,the Islamic world was entering a golden age. In 641 AD, Muslim Arabs come to Egypt. Since they are doing so well in this time, it spread quickly across Africa and into Southeast Asia, and even into Spain.
The Ottoman Empire even held the territory from the beginning 16th century to the end of the 18th century.
TL;DR Muslims showed up 1400 years ago and haven’t left.
Probably the same reason the people of the United States don’t believe in Etu or other Native American spirits.
They become Christian first, under roman rule.. You know Cleopatra was the last Pharoah around Jesus time. Emperor Theodosius made Christianity the religion of state in 381, then in 391 CE made the public worship of the old gods a criminal offence.
The Egyptians obeyed this and abandoned the old Gods. Later, the Muslim conquest started which leads us up to the crusades. They took Egypt. Most likely there was conversion by force by Christians and Islamic but the romans never needed to actually invade so there was probably a lot less forced conversion (conversion or die).
I think also in general monotheistic religions spread easier than polytheistic.
It’s easier to learn that there is one god called Allah and his prophet is Mohammad, than trying to remember all of the Greek and Egyptian pantheons, all their rituals and feast days etc etc.
There was a brief period of monotheistic worship in ancient Egypt, where Amun was worshipped as the sole god.
Christianity does the same thing. Believe in Jesus? That’s enough.
I think Hinduism is the exception, being an extremely popular polytheistic religion but it’s also because the population in India is so massive.
It’s not the same people. Egypt was conquered over many hundreds of years BC. Greek. Romans. Arab conquest etc. Over time the orignal eqgyptians were pushed out, bred out or whatever, and the whole thing changed. People, language, food culture etc.
I would like to note that Allah is not some other god. Allah is just the word for God in Arabic. Coptic Christians and other Arabic speaking Christians call the god of Abraham, or God, Allah.
Because Muslims impose their religion on the people they conquer.
Sometimes it’s at the point of a sword, Sometimes it’s by making them “Dhimmis”, a second-class citizenship with demeaning rules and high taxes, which they can escape by converting to Islam, with the threat of death for converting back.
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